


Red Tigers

by ribbonista



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Blood Brothers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 09:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4559607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ribbonista/pseuds/ribbonista
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darius comes home with a wound.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Tigers

**Author's Note:**

> if u think this is shipping fic boy you'd be wrong

Darius came home with blood pouring down his face from a gnarly gash over his eye, cutting deep into the mottled, slightly freckled skin and staining his collar red. The crimson gush painted his face a grim portrait as he stormed past the other children of the Noxian orphanage until he was in the bunk room that housed the bed he and his little brother slept in, creaky and old. Like the sea, the children parted liberally, staying a near comical amount away from the bloodied twelve year old Darius, knowing that this was a boy who was told he was too violent, too angry to ever be adopted, and that this boy had nearly beaten half a dozen other children to death simply for glancing at Draven wrong. Darius, however, thought his cause noble.

Draven was sitting on that creaky old bed, wrapped up in a burrito blanket and staring languidly out the window. Tucked under his chin was the ratty, falling-apart stuffed figure of a poro, missing both its button eyes, it's ragged felt tongue limp and moth-bitten. The seven year old turned to see who was entering the bunk room, and Darius rolled his eyes as he watched Draven's visage turn from delight, to horror, to fear as his elder tween sibling stormed into the room. Darius fell to his knees in front of the bunk and began to grope blindly under the bed, finally grazing his fingers over a discarded, dusty t-shirt with which to wipe his face.

“Darius...”

Darius ignored his brother.

“Darius!”

Again, ignored.

This time, Draven fell off of the bed, the tattered poro bouncing and falling at Darius' feet, and as he looked down, two crimson splotches dripped from his mauled face onto the brisk white fur. He sneered and knocked the stuffed animal away.

“What did you do!? What di-” The young brother's pleas were cut off as Darius swung heavily towards him, and against his better judgement, Darius already knew that his bloodied face was far too close in his strange younger brother's comfort zone. Biting back the searing, rage-filled retort he was about to explode, he gently closed his eyes, one flashing with red-hot pain, and opened his mouth to tell off his younger brother in a more _gentler_ manner. 

But he couldn't. He felt something solid press against his forehead and when he opened his eyes, he was met back with intense green, the spitting image of what he could remember of his mother. Draven had _always_ looked more like their mother.

The younger sibling had his forehead pressed up against Darius' own, hands touching his cheeks, his grassy gaze intense and unyielding. Darius knew his little brother did not like being touched without his own explicit permission, knew that his brother was _off_ and _different_ , but the way the seven year old Noxian scowled, imitating his elder brother, almost made Darius laugh out loud, right there, as his gash seared with pain and began to roll scarlet kisses down the cheekbones of the boy he cared about more than anything in the world. Darius sighed.

“I went out to walk,” He began, voice gruff, almost annoyed. “And some other kids starting making fun of us. You, mostly. _Always_ you.” The twelve year old Noxian rolled his eyes impertinently, but his chest ached. “Do you think I was going to dare let them speak of us- of you like that? No! I got into a fight and- I don't really remember. I suppose he found a shard of glass. I came home.”

“But now it's going to _scar!_ ” 

“I don't care, you fool! Now get off of me!” Darius snapped, and he (gently) pried his little brother off of him, using the t-shirt he was wiping his own face off with to dab at the speckles of brother blood on Draven's face. 

Draven stared, scowling, and Darius knew he wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words- this happened often and was a cause for the other children's scorn towards Darius' most important person. Draven could barely stand up for himself physically- it was no wonder he couldn't ever do it _verbally_.

Lost in these thoughts, Darius' eyelashes fluttered and he blinked as he felt something- Draven- touch his face. Two fingers swiped in the crimson pouring down his cheek and Darius watched, disturbed, as Draven drew those fingers over his own eye and cheek, two grisly red streaks down his pale face.

“There,” The little Noxian brother spoke, softly but with a certain firmness in his voice. “We match.”

Darius could do naught but stare.

The next day, and the day after that, Draven did not go without his red war paint, though by now it _was_ actual paint and not his elder sibling's blood. Other children tittered behind his back but were silenced by purely animalistic death-glares that rivaled Darius' own, and Darius, at these times, always clapped his younger brother on the back. Even at the pleas of the orphanage mistresses, Draven did not remove his war stripes, stating through a bucked, gap-tooth wry grin that he needn't be adopted anymore if he had his brother along with him.

Months went by, and Darius' scar turned from a thick red line to a mottled, textured road across his face, but the flash of scarlet on the seven year old Draven's face never moved, leaving only during moments of bathing or if it rubbed off on his pillow in his sleep, and it was always liberally reapplied in the morning.

And then years went by, and both the Noxian brothers turned into teenagers, and still, the red lines across Draven's face remained. They remained into adulthood, remained when Draven entered the military, and remained when he left too. When Darius watched his baby brother's first ever execution gauntlet, there at that Noxian prison, he was surprised to see those trailing lines of red down a gaunt and grinning face, fangs bared.

The lines always remained, through trial and fail and success, and when Darius was shoulder-to-shoulder with tree trunks and leaves grazing his face, nearly running into his brother right there, in the thick of the Rift, he raised his axe and his brother raised his own, and Darius' eyes casted over those red streaks adorning Draven's face, and he'd always lower his weapon, even if it meant certain death and the echo of Draven's cackle. Remorseless.

Draven, for sure, by now had forgotten what the lines meant or symbolized, and wore them simply as a flashy show of his _Draven-ness_. But Darius had never forgotten what Draven's war paint really meant, and he didn't think he ever could. He simply wasn't that sort of man.


End file.
